On the role of loanwords in the analysis of Norwegian stress and quantity

The prosody of a prototypical Norwegian word is characterized by the following properties: (i) it is disyllabic, (ii) the initial syllable is bimoraic and stressed, and (iii) the final syllable is monomoraic and unstressed (Kristoffersen 2000). The weight of the initial syllable can be realized either with a long vowel or by closing the syllable, e.g. with a geminate. Norwegian words can also be monosyllabic, having either a final geminate (hatt ‘hat’), a final singleton (hat ‘hatred’), or a final open syllable (se ‘see’). Stress can be assigned to such a word by constructing a trochee at either edge of the word, and indeed both analyses have been advocated (Rice 2003, Kristoffersen 2003). The stress patterns of loanwords, however, reveal additional details about the assignment of stress, and sort out some unresolvable ambiguities arising when just considering the native vocabulary. These facts form the basis for advocating a right-edge oriented analysis of stress in Norwegian. Of particular interest here, however, are two patterns revealed in the disyllabic loans with final stress. Loanwords with final stress can preserve their final stress in Norwegian, even though no native words have this pattern. I claim here that such loans with final closed syllables (e.g. traf́ıkk, tomát) are able to preserve this pattern because of the parallels between the final syllables of the loans and the native monosyllables. In contrast with the consonant-final loans, words with final stress on open syllables (komité, armé, allé) cannot be generated by the grammar, the existence of monosyllabic words such as se notwithstanding. The grammar can never yield stress on a final open ∗Please address correspondence about this work to me at [email protected]. For further developments of this project and a draft of the paper, please visit http://www.hum.uit.no/a/rice or http://castl.uit.no. The latter address also includes information about ConSOLE XIII, to be held in Tromsø on December 2-4, 2004, and OCP2, to be held in Tromsø January 20-22, 2005. Bli med!